Donna Leon: Beastly Things

‘Madelung,’ Rizzardi corrected automatically, then went on, ‘You might send an official request for information to the hospitals with centres for genetic diseases, with a description of him.’ Then, after a moment’s reflection, the doctor added, ‘Assuming he’s been diagnosed, that is.’

Thinking back to the man he had seen on the table, Brunetti asked, ‘But how could he not be? Diagnosed, that is. You saw his neck, the size of him.’

Outside the door to his office, Rizzardi turned to Brunetti and said, ‘Guido, there are people walking around everywhere with symptoms of serious disease so visible they’d cause any doctor’s hair to catch fire if they saw them.’

‘And?’ Brunetti asked.

‘And they tell themselves it’s nothing, that it will go away if they just ignore it. They’ll stop coughing, the bleeding will stop, the thing on their leg will disappear.’

‘And?’

‘And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’ Brunetti asked.

‘Then I get to see them,’ Rizzardi said grimly. He gave himself a shake, as if, like Brunetti, he wanted to free himself of certain thoughts, and added, ‘I know someone at Padova who might know about Madelung: I’ll call her. That’s the likely place someone from the Veneto would go.’

And if he’s not from the Veneto? Brunetti found himself wondering, but he said nothing to the pathologist. Instead, he thanked him and asked if he wanted to go down to the bar for a coffee.

‘No, thanks. Like yours, my life is filled with papers and reports, and I planned to waste the rest of my morning reading them and writing them.’

Brunetti accepted his decision with a nod and started towards the main entrance of the hospital. A lifetime of good health had done nothing to counter the effects of imagination; thus Brunetti was often subject to the attacks of diseases to which he had not been exposed and of which he displayed no symptoms. Paola was the only person he had ever told about this, though his mother, while she was still capable of knowing things, had known, or at least suspected. Paola managed to see the absurdity of his uneasiness: it is too much to call them fears, since a large part of him was never persuaded that he actually had the disease in question.

His imagination scorned banal things like heart disease or flu, often upping the ante and giving himself West Nile Fever or meningitis. Malaria, once. Diabetes, though unknown in his family, was an old and frequently visiting friend. Part of him knew these diseases served as lightning rods to keep his mind from suspecting that any loss of memory, however momentary, was the first symptom of what he really feared. Better a night mulling over the bizarre symptoms of dengue fever than the flash of alarm that came when he failed to remember the number of Vianello’s telefonino .

Brunetti turned his thoughts to the man with the neck: he had begun to think of him in those terms. His eyes were blue, which meant Brunetti must have seen him somewhere or seen a photo of him: nothing else would explain his certainty.

Mind on autopilot, Brunetti continued towards the Questura. Crossing over Rio di S. Giovanni, he checked the waters for signs of the seaweed that had, during the last few years, been snaking its way deeper into the heart of the city. He consulted his mental map and saw that it would drift up the Rio dei Greci, if it came. Certainly there was enough of it and to spare slopping out there against Riva degli Schiavoni: it hardly needed a strong tide to propel it into the viscera of the city.

He noticed it then, unruly patches floating towards him on the incoming tide. He remembered seeing, a decade ago, the flat-nosed boats with their front-end scoops, chugging about in the laguna , dining on the giant drifts of seaweed. Where had they gone and what were they doing now, those odd little boats, silly and stunted but oh, so voraciously useful? He had crossed the causeway on a train last week, flanked by vast islands of floating weed. Boats skirted them; birds avoided them; nothing could survive beneath them. Did no one else notice, or was everyone meant to pretend they weren’t there? Or was the jurisdiction of the waters of the laguna divided up among warring authorities – the city, the region, the province, the Magistrate of the Waters – parcelled and wrapped up so tightly as to make motion impossible?

As Brunetti walked, his thoughts unrolled and wandered where they chose. In the past, when he encountered a person he had met somewhere, he occasionally recognized them without remembering who they were. Often, along with that physical recognition came the memory of an emotional aura – he could think of no more apt term – they had left with him. He knew he liked them or disliked them, though the reasons for that feeling had disappeared along with their identity.

Seeing the man with the neck – he had to stop calling him that – had made Brunetti uneasy, for the emotional aura that had come with the memory of the colour of his eyes was uncertain, bringing with it a sense of Brunetti’s desire to help him. It was impossible to sort his way through this. The place where he had just seen the man made it obvious that someone had failed to help him or that he had failed to help himself, but there was no reconstructing now whether it was the sight of him earlier that day or the sense of having seen him before that had prompted this urge in Brunetti.

Still mulling this over, he entered the Questura and headed towards his office. About to start up the final flight of steps, he turned back and went into the room shared by members of the uniformed branch. Pucetti sat at the computer, his attention riveted to the screen as his hands flew over the keys. Brunetti stopped just inside the door. Pucetti might as well have been on some other planet, so little was he conscious of the room in which he sat.

As Brunetti watched, Pucetti’s body grew ever tenser, his breathing tighter. The young officer began to mutter to himself, or perhaps to the computer. Without warning, Pucetti’s face, and then his body, relaxed. He pulled his hands from the keys, stared a moment at the screen, then raised his right hand, index finger extended, and jabbed at a single key in the manner of a jazz pianist hitting the final note he knew would bring the audience to its feet.

Pucetti’s hand bounced away from the keys and stopped, forgotten, at the level of his ear, his eyes still on the screen. Whatever he saw there lifted him to his feet, both arms jammed above his head in the gesture made by every triumphant athlete Brunetti had ever seen on the sports page. ‘Got you, you bastard!’ the young officer shouted, waving his fists wildly over his head and shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. It wasn’t a war dance, but it was close. Alvise and Riverre, standing together at the other side of the room, turned towards the noise and motion, their surprise evident.

Brunetti took a few steps into the room. ‘What have you done, Pucetti?’ he asked, then added, ‘Who’d you get?’

Pucetti, radiant with a mixture of glee and triumph that took a decade off his face, turned to his superior. ‘Those bastards at the airport,’ he said, punctuating his statement with two quick uppercuts into the air above his head.

‘The baggage handlers?’ Brunetti asked, though it was hardly necessary. He had been investigating them and arresting them for almost a decade.

‘ Sì .’ Pucetti failed to restrain a hoot of wild success, and his dancing feet took two more triumphant steps.

Alvise and Riverre, intrigued, moved towards them.

‘What did you do?’ Brunetti asked.

With an act of will, Pucetti brought his feet together and lowered his hands. ‘I got into…’ he began and then, glancing at his fellow officers, said, enthusiasm fading from his voice, ‘some information about one of them, sir.’